In France, is Sarkozy spying on journalists?

Every
Wednesday morning in France, rain or shine, half a million people eagerly wait
for the satirical weekly, Le Canard
Enchainé. Some wait for it nervously. The old-fashioned broadsheet, a
venerable media institution that has no real equivalent in other European
countries, posts its motto defiantly on its front page: "Freedom of the press
wears out only when you do not use it."

And use it
it does! Every week it joyfully exposes politicians' peccadilloes,
sarcastically sends darts and laurels to their sloppy colleagues in the press
and cunningly publishes confidential memos and transcripts of supposedly
private political or bureaucratic meetings.

Every now
and then it drops a big bomb on Paris' political establishment, whoever is in power,
the right or the left. In the 1980s and '90s, its blaring guns were pounding
Socialist François Mitterrand. Now it is the turn of the conservative Sarkozy
government to feel the heat.

In its
latest issue the newspaper has bluntly accused the French president of
"supervising the spying of French journalists." Anyone who digs too far into
stories that Nicolas Sarkozy considers "out of limits" is a target, writes Le Canard. The hottest item on the list
of the president's taboo stories appears to be the alleged illegal funding of
the ruling party by the richest woman in France, Liliane Bettencourt, a case
that implicates the current labor minister, Eric Woerth. (See my previous blog entry.)

According
to Le Canard's editor-in-chief,
Claude Angeli, each time Sarkozy is upset by a press story he personally calls Bernard
Squarcini, head of the French counterintelligence services known as DCRI, and
orders him to swoop in on the sniffing journalists, check their phone calls,
and identify their sources inside the administration. The mobile phone
companies dutifully provide listings of all of the journalists' phone calls, Le Canard writes.

Squarcini
apparently does not enjoy the role. "I am not interested in monitoring
journalists," he told a parliamentary committee, "except those that might sleep
with the enemy. I have much more pressing issues to follow, like the growing
threat of terrorism."

However,
whatever his caveats, "he has to comply and act," Le Canard says. "A special team has been set up within DCRI to
carry out discreet searches," although the actual "plumbing operations" might
have been entrusted, for the sake of "plausible deniability," to private
contractors and former members of the "services."

Recently a
few journalists known to be in the firing line of the government's sleuths have
been the victims of strange burglaries. Their houses or offices have been
broken into, computers, GPS, hard discs, and CDs stolen.

These
misadventures have affected Le Point,
a respected center-right weekly magazine, the "paper of record" Le Monde and Mediapart, a savvy left-leaning online publication directed by Edwy
Plenel, a former editor-in-chief of Le
Monde and a victim in the 1980s, under François Mitterrand's presidency, of
a particularly vindictive phone-tapping operation.

The day
after Le Canard broke the story, Mediapart followed up by asserting that
two of its journalists in charge of the Woerth-Bettencourt investigation had
been monitored by the secret services. In an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche, Edwy Plenel also
denounced that its real estate portfolio had been investigated and Mediapart minority shareholders put
under pressure. The online news media also accused Claude Guéant, the powerful
and secretive general secretary of Elysée Palace, of overseeing the whole
espionage operation.

President
Sarkozy and his spokespeople have denied any involvement in these barbouzeries (the French word for
spooks' undercover operations) and described the accusations as "grotesque."
Two people accused in the media of being the brains of the conspiracy, Claude
Guéant and Bernard Squarcini, have announced that they will file a complaint
for libel.

The issue
has triggered sharp reactions. Many journalists fear that the government wants
to intimidate them and force them to stay away from controversial stories. And
they are surprised that many in France seem to consider this "affaire" as
secondary. "Anything that attacks press freedom, a right of all citizens,
should be a national scandal," said Edway Plenel. "In the U.S., it would be."

On Monday
French journalists unions asked for the establishment of an independent
investigative committee to shed light on the harassments suffered by their
colleagues covering the Woerth-Bettencourt story. The left-wing opposition has
gleefully jumped into the fray. The Socialist Party, which is already up in
arms about the government's pension overhaul, sees this whole pandemonium as a
great opportunity to slam Sarkozy and endear itself to the media. It's called
for a parliamentary investigation into what it called "sickly interventionism"
against journalists.

CPJ Europe Representative Marthoz is a Belgian journalist and longtime press freedom and human rights activist. He teaches international journalism at the Université catholique de Louvain and is a columnist for the Belgian daily Le Soir.